Food Culture

Killer Curry Challenge - Eatocracy - CNN.com Blogs

Attention Food Blogger Friends: Four Manual Settings You Need to Know for Shooting Food - NYTimes.com

via dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com

Korean-Style Tacos Move From West to East - NYTimes.com

TOMAS LEE has long dreamed of selling American consumers on Korean barbecue.  Mr. Lee, a 42-year-old native of Seoul, South Korea, who grew up in Mustang, Okla., took a step toward realizing that dream in October 2009 when he opened Hankook Taqueria in Atlanta, serving tacos stuffed with soy- and garlic-marinated beef, along with chicken and pork, all barbecued in the Korean style.

“I was going to open a traditional Korean barbecue restaurant,” Mr. Lee said. Then his wife, Mackenzie, had an idea. “She saw this thing about Kogi on the Web,” he recalled. “And I thought tacos might be a way to get Korean food on everybody’s table.”

What captured Ms. Lee’s attention was Kogi Korean BBQ-To-Go, a retrofitted catering truck that rolled onto the streets of Southern California in November 2008, selling corn tortillas piled with Korean-style barbecued short ribs known as kalbi, garnished with onion, cilantro and a hash of chili-soy-dressed lettuce.

Eighteen months later, dozens of entrepreneurs across the country are selling Korean tacos. Like Buffalo wings and California rolls, Korean tacos have gone national, this time with unprecedented speed. Few of these entrepreneurs appear to have made pilgrimages to Southern California to eat at a Kogi truck. (There are now five.) Many, especially those of Korean ancestry, say they studied news media reports of the Kogi concept, recognized their culture at the core, and made the concept their own.

“You get the feeling that this is our chance to mainstream Korean food,” said Jae Kim, a Seoul native, selling Korean tacos since February at his Chi’Lantro truck in Austin, Tex. “And it’s happening so quickly. It’s like everybody is realizing that it’s now or never.”

via www.nytimes.com

Discounts for Dining and Cookware - NYTimes.com

Blackboard Eats, a Web site started by food writers and other professionals offering subscribers discounts at restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, is adding online shopping for food, cookware and other culinary items. This new component, called Everywhere, starts on July 21 and, as with the restaurants, has savings of up to 30 percent and special offers. It opens with cheeses from Murray’s Cheese, knives from macknife.com and all the coffee and tea at Intelligentsia Coffee.

Once logged on to blackboardeats.com, users click “everywhere” and have 24 hours to sign up for an offer, using a free pass code issued on the site. The offers remain available for only 24 hours, unlike the restaurant discounts, which can be used for a month.

via www.nytimes.com

French Fries and Dumplings: Two Unlikely Winners of Scharffen Berger's Third Annual Chocolate Adventure Contest

Chef Elizabeth Falkner and a Panel of Experts Select Two $10,000 Grand Prize Winners for Creating Recipes Using Scharffen Berger Chocolate and at Least One of 16 "Adventure" Ingredients

Two very creative home cooks were awarded a Grand Prize of $10,000, each, in the third annual Chocolate Adventure Contest sponsored by Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker and TuttiFoodie.com. As part of the contest, daring cooks -- amateur or professional -- were invited to develop original and creative recipes combining Scharffen Berger chocolate products with one or more of 16 enticing "adventure" ingredients.

New York's Karin Lazarus and Edwina Gadsby from Great Falls, Montana out-cooked 15 other finalists with their imaginative and delicious uses of Scharffen Berger chocolate and the adventure ingredients. Judged in two categories, sweet and savory, Lazarus' Chocolate-Filled Pandan Dumplings and Gadsby's Smoky Cocoa-Dusted Pommes Frites with Peanut-Cumin Dipping Sauce came out as the winners.

Karin Lazarus paired adventure ingredients, pandan leaves and rice flour, with Scharffen Berger 62% semisweet chocolate baking chunks for a delicious dessert that infuses a truffle-like treat with Asian influences. 

 

Chocolate-Filled Pandan Dumplings

Edwina Gadsby chose to work with raw honey, peanut butter, cumin, paprika, smoked sea salt and Scharffen Berger unsweetened cocoa powder to give a sophisticated makeover to one of America's favorite snacks: French fries and ketchup.

Smoky Cocoa-Dusted Pommes Frites with Peanut-Cumin Dipping Sauce 

Wine101: Start Clicking

Where can one quietly -- and without having to ask the clerk at Borders or our food snob friends -- learn more about wine?  

There was news last week of wine search engine and social network WineMcGee.com announcing integration with online wine retailer Wine.com, to create a wine database that includes flavor profiles, food pairings, professional ratings, and consumer reviews on over 45,000 wines. For you tech geeks, the integration is powered by the Wine.com API (application programming interface), which provides access to the extensive catalog of wine content at Wine.com.

Inviting Japan Over for Dinner

Cynthia Lin, Contributing Writer, Food Culture

The culture of American cuisine has long been a hodgepodge of various ethnic influences. Whether we merge regional elements and call it “fusion” or transform outlandish entrees into All-American icons, what’s eaten here is really a melting pot of global victuals. 

Take the hot dog and hamburger, each of German origin, yet so symbolic of the States. Then there’s the pizza, obviously Italian, but such a big part of our social diet.  Or, of course, General Tso’s Chicken – explicitly Chinese, but exclusively American.

At last week’s International Restaurant and Foodservice Show of New York, the showroom traffic at the grand culinary affair in the Javits Center seemed to perpetuate this trend. The crowds were disproportionately concentrated at the northern end of the grounds. It wasn’t the aisles exhibiting the latest in restaurant technology or innovative marketing. It wasn’t the lane displaying local farming. It wasn’t the gelato-packed dessert carts. 

It was the community of booths housed under a banner labeled “Flavors of Japan.”